Film / Video

In her recent rave review of Paranoid Park, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis invokes Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Dargis’ connection is no accident, as Van Sant himself credits Tarr’s work in helping shape his own vision in making his last four films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park(screening this Wednesday at the Walker). Last November the Walker was lucky enough to host a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective with auteur Tarr, whose mesmerizing, languid films are rarely shown in the U.S. Tarr was certainly a bit more tight-lipped about his thought process as a filmmaker than Van Sant, but analyzing the connections between the two is interesting nonetheless. I love how both Tarr and Van Sant’s work have so many similarities in terms of their sublime cinematography of long takes, shot with a slow-moving camera–and yet each is so rooted in their particular location: Tarr with his vast Hungarian wastelands, Van Sant with his Pacific Northwest ethos.

For a MOMA retrospective on Tarr, Van Sant wrote an essay about Tarr’s films, which I’ve reproduced below. When so many current filmmakers seem to eschew the past, I admire Van Sant for having the capacity to learn from a true master of cinema–and can’t wait to see Tarr’s influence manifest itself in Van Sant’s new work.

The Camera is a Machine

I have been influenced by Béla Tarr's films and after reviewing the last three works Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies, I find myself attempting to rethink film grammar and the effect industry has had on it. This is the way I see it. Cinema started as simple single-shot full-length proscenium compositions resembling theater, the only thing that it could find to reference to commercialize itself. By the next twenty years there was a new vocabulary. The close up, montage, and parallel storytelling fragmented the continuity of the previous proscenium-encased static-frame full-figure images. Separate fragments were now placed together to form meaning, the director could play with time and cinematic space. It was exciting. Was this an absolute inevitable direction or just one road cinema chose to take?

I believe these cinematic innovations complimented industry and created an Industrial Vocabulary. The director could tell you how to think about scenes by the way he played with separate pieces. He could control his characters, he could control time and story, and he could control you. Left behind were the proscenium and the static take, which were old-fashioned.

Things were modern, things were easier, like doing your laundry, there was a washing machine now that would do it for you. The modern cinema was an invention that could think for you, you didn't have to do in anymore, like in the theater.

The Cinema of Industry has progressed into mega-industry and mega-cinema but remaining ideally the same? The cinematic vocabulary of a 2001 television show like Ally McBeal is virtually the same as Birth of a Nation's. It is no surprise that Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest film of all time, a film about selling oneself down the river along with the copper, coal and timber while nostalgically longing for a lost Victorian era, and film vocabulary's original beginnings, a Rosebud, that has been left behind in another century.

Béla's stuff seems to be a successful and authentic departure, a wholly other cinema beginning over again. A cinema that needed to come from outside our Western Culture, a lost Rosebud, one of the many directions cinema might have before we sold ourselves down the river.

Béla's creations use static full figure landscapes, as if referencing the 1800's steam engine pulling into a station that would force audience members standing in the gallery to run for the exit so they wouldn't get hit by the train. Somehow Béla has gotten himself back there psychically and learned things all over again as if modern cinema had never happened. An angry crowd marches down a street to burn down the hospital in Werckmeister Harmonies, a shot that lasts about five minutes. When asked after a screening why the shot of the crowd lasted for so long, Béla answered, "because it was a long way." The question was an honest one, why would the audience weaned on post modern industrial cinema sit and watch an angry mob for so long when they have been used to a shot that lasts only a couple of seconds, even a shot ten or fifteen seconds would be too long. But the answer, although funny, is also an honest one, it was a long enough way that to show it for five minutes it affects the way we think about the event, the mob, the march, the hospital. Not shorthanded, not as clipped as in Industrial Vocabulary, but played out lyrically and poetically, letting us in on the thoughts rather than just saying one thing like, the mob walked, rather; the mob walked, and grimaced and raised their torches, and walked in synchronized and unsynchronized steps, advanced, fell back, and when they arrived it had been a long way.

Hitchcock said in response to a question by François Truffaut that major stylistic film changes could happen through character, perhaps, but here is a very major change through ideas.

Béla's works are organic and contemplative in their intentions rather than shortened and contemporary. They find themselves contemplating life in a way that is almost impossible watching an ordinary modern film. They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.
--Gus Van Sant, MoMA Bela Tarr Retrospective Catalogue, 2001.

With films characterized as remarkable, mesmerizing, and devastating–not to mention, in the case of Satantango, a bona-fide masterpiece–Béla Tarr’s upcoming Regis Dialogue and Retrospective (September 14-October 21) is sure to be an extraordinary experience. For a sneak peek into the mind of the master, here is film critic Howard Feinstein’s Regis essay on Béla Tarr. Feinstein will be interviewing Tarr on-stage at the Walker Cinema on September 14.
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Critics have generally divided the famously uncompromising Hungarian director Béla Tarr's films into two distinct stylistic periods, with a truncated TV version of Macbeth (1982) marking a transitional point. Under the influence of the "documentary fiction" movement led by Istvan Darday (a politicized socialist realism), under whom he had been an assistant director, as well as John Cassavetes, cinema vérité, and possibly even the British "kitchen sink" school, he shot his first three features, known as the "proletarian trilogy:" Family Nest (1979), The Outsider (1981), and The Prefab People (1982). Here we have in urban settings handheld camera, nonprofessional actors, some improvised dialogue, multiple closeups, and conventional editing rhythms as Tarr explores the social and economic conditions-- especially a major housing shortage--that play havoc with the personal lives of his perpetually frustrated characters. (The seeds of his obsession with cinematic time can be seen, for example, in the meaningful ellipses.) In these claustrophobic environments, people become aggressive and communication is impossible. Men are mostly irresponsible and either actively or passively oppressive toward women, who may be victims but are decent and sensitive to one another's plights.

Besides a concern with working-class people and the social circumstances of their private lives, these early low-budget features have other elements in common with the better known works of the later Tarr: whether unconscious or not, the striking compositions of his mise-en-scène, not to mention powerful ambient sound, reveal an aesthete's eye and ear. He has always been acutely aware of the process of seeing, which he will later take to a degree that undermines the conventions of cinema as we know it. A tiger doesn't change its stripes.

In the one-hour Macbeth, which has the feel of live television, gritty realism has been replaced by a spare stylization. He doesn't edit so much as follow his actors up and down, left and right, in real time. It comprises only two takes, but the second is 55 minutes long. Tarr is developing a logic of film time that is based on the action (or non-action) of his characters and the landscape in which they function--even if here it is within the confines of a theatrical proscenium. (The 1984 Almanac of Fall, shot almost entirely in interiors in which he uses architecture and objects to block his more bourgeois characters and comment on their nasty behavior, can also be thought of as a transitional work.)

In most of the films of Tarr's so-called second period, characters (and viewers) stare out of windows for prolonged periods--just as his camera, no longer handheld and frequently panning ever so slowly, surveys the minutiae of their lives and the (generally rural) landscapes that they inhabit with a bare minimum of cuts, and with a remarkably sharp depth of field. (He has frequently referred to location as a character in his work, and he and longtime partner, editor, and sometime coscreenwriter Ágnes Hranitzky spend a great deal of time finding the perfect locales in which to shoot.) Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) were all done in collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai, Hranitzky, cinematographer Gábor Medvigy, and composer Mihály Víg. (There is never any doubt as to who is boss.) On one level, the extremely long takes are a visual correlative to Krasznahorkai's famously long sentences. Someone, or a group, may walk for 10 minutes or longer, but the camera travels with them. Even if a section is, as in his seven-and-one-half hour magnum opus Satantango, an observation of the ordinary activity of an inebriated doctor in his home, Tarr has come as close as any filmmaker to finding a parallel to a gifted writer's detailed descriptions of life's banalities. What is truly astounding, especially in Satantango, is that long sequences are not necessarily successive but concurrent--"meanwhile, back at the ranch," without the crosscutting that D. W. Griffith made into convention. Redundancy is a recurring trope. No wonder Susan Sontag referred to Tarr among those directors whose films are "heroic violations of the norms."

In these last three films, Tarr has elaborated upon the fog machine that graced the Macbeth stage for texture and commentary. We still find fog, but also endless rain, mud, pigs, the peeling paint of rundown buildings, and large empty spaces. Through simple, generally unsympathetic characters, mostly peasants, he builds a visual and aural world--natural sounds have never sounded so dramatic--in which people are nasty, often drunk, criminal, and either susceptible to authoritarian leadership or authoritarians themselves. Incredibly quiet sequences alternate with boisterous pub scenes. The films are in black and white, but in a wide variety of subtle, calculated shades--including the variations on gray praised by Lotte Eisner when she described the German Expressionists of the silent era--to fit the situation at hand. (Tarr has said he despises the falseness of Kodak color stock.)

Some call these movies bleak, but I think of them as lying somewhere between anthropology and allegory. This is the landscape of a country beaten down by Communism, by false hopes, by the elements themselves. Tarr claims that these works are not at all political, although he acknowledges that he hopes they reveal a "social sensibility." Many critics call them metaphysical, cosmic, cousins to Tarkovsky (whom Tarr finds "soft"). Tarr will have none of that: for him, they are concrete and one should not think too much about such lofty things. (It's ironic that he originally studied philosophy.) No matter: these latter films ooze from their groundedness a strong sense of spirituality.

What is rarely mentioned is the humor of the films and the director himself, whose attitude toward life does not appear otherworldly. When asked recently whether things were improving in his homeland, the 51-year-old Tarr told Time Out New York, "We Hungarians were always too lazy--too lazy for Fascism, too lazy for Communism. We are eating too much, drinking too much, making love too much."

His most recent film is The Man From London, which premiered in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It was adapted by Krasznahorkai from a Georges Simenon novel. Shot in Sardinia with an international cast, it is set in a small seaside town. The film is a perfect marriage of Tarr's aesthetic sensibility and the policier. Complementing the trench coats and bright bulbs that suit the genre are the dark blackand- white stock (Fred Kelemen's cinematography is mesmerizing) and the director's propensity for shadows, fog, unbelievably slow pans and tracking shots, and somber, held accordion chords. Tarr nevertheless adds some signature touches from outside the genre, like the sequence of drunken eccentrics in a hotel bar. The basic plotline: Maloin (Czech actor Miroslav Krobot) is a signalman at a dockside railway who witnesses a robbery and murder, then steals the loot. Stalked by the man he has burned, he wrestles with his conscience about how to keep the money.

We are far from the plains of landlocked Hungary.

--Howard Feinstein, adapted from his essay in the 2006 Sarajevo Film Festival catalogue. New York-based Howard Feinstein has written on film for such publications as the Guardian, Vanity Fair, Time Out, the Times of London, Sight & Sound, Filmmaker, Premiere, Indiewire, and Out. He has curated exhibitions on ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia and since 1999 has been a selector for the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he also programs Panorama (fiction), Panorama Documentaries, and Tribute to, the annual directors' retrospectives (Béla Tarr received a tribute in 2006).

Sheryl Mousley of the Walker Art Center (left), actor Bud Cort, and Al Milgrom of Minnesota Film Arts, at the Karlovy Vary film festival on July 4. Bud Cort was there for a screening of the 1971 film Harold and Maude, directed by 70s great Hal Ashby. At the Variety post-screening party, Cort approached Mousley and Milgrom to acknowledge the Minneapolis film audience that sustained Harold and Maude’s three-year run at Edina's now-defunct Morningside Movie Theater. Cort reported that this long run made the film’s reputation and helped “change his career.”

While best known for his turn in Harold and Maude, Bud Cort's film career actually kicked off when he was "discovered" by director Robert Altman, who cast him in both M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud. Brewster McCloud, one of Altman's lesser-known films, stars Cort as a boy living in a fallout shelter who dreams to fly in the Houston Astrodome. A must-see for both Cort and Altman fans, the fantastical farce also features an incredibly long-lashed Shelley Duvall, who too had just been discovered by Altman--at a Houston cosmetics counter, no less.

Here's a link to the Karlovy Vary festival's website story about Bud Cort and his time living with Groucho Marx.

Over the past 16 years, the Walker Art Center's Regis Dialogue and Film Retrospective program has brought together some of the most innovative and influential filmmakers of our time with leading critics, writers and historians. We've just greatly enhanced the Regis Dialogues section of our website by uploading all of the interviewers' introductory essays on the honored filmmakers. These singular documents run the gamut in showcasing the visionaries of cinema history: from Roger Ebert discussing Werner Herzog's work (along with Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration," referenced in a recent New Yorker); to B. Ruby Rich's thesis-quality exposition of Jodie Foster's life-long career; to James Schamus' loving tribute to his 15-year collaboration with Ang Lee. They are definitely worth a look.

To view each, click on the individual artist and then on the "introduction" link.

This program is made possible by generous support from Regis Foundation. Many thanks to Ben Wiggins for his help on this project.

John Mitchell was unlike anyone else.

I’m sorry if I sound trite in my grief over his death, but there it is.

I must start by saying that Mitchell always told it like it was. I remember him meeting Elliott Gould with a loud, cringe-inducing yet apropos: “You’re much BIGGER than I expected!”

He was a multifaceted, complex man. I only knew one small part of him: a great film lover in our community. He was an instigator and a provocative force behind the late, great repertory theater the Oak Street Cinema. Few knew of his behind-the-scenes impact on Twin Cities culture (which was significant indeed) although many experienced him holding court under the lights of the marquee and at other film venues such as the Walker, discussing cinema, poetry, psychology, life. The Oak Street was infused with his spirit: brash yet graceful; smart yet inclusive; and above all, humane. He had an acerbic, dead-on wit, but always followed it with his singular laugh - a boisterously loud bellow that embraced you in its sheer joy.

Mitchell, you will be missed.

“As Parks sifts through the cache of memories his Promethean talents have created, he refuses to be bitter about the denials, limits and indignities that have been, at one time or another, imposed upon his work. His trials have made him widely empathetic toward victims of any prejudice and skeptical about the privileges of race, class, or nation to establish the proper basis for human interaction. Through the power of his words, this intelligent and sensitive interpreter of human experience has now turned the mirror toward us, as well as himself; we, like Parks, must be judged by the integrity of our response to what we hear and see. Let us hope that we are half as successful as he has been.”–Michael Eric Dyson, in his essay “Gordon Parks: Prometheus in Motion”, written for Gordon Parks in Retrospect, a 1996 Regis Dialogue and Retrospective at Walker Art Center.

MNStories also put up a nice obituary post with a video clip of Mr. Parks as well. Take a look.

Ang Lee won Best Achievement in Directing at the Academy Awards last night for his work on Brokeback Mountain. His acceptance speech acknowledged the Brokeback characters, Ennis and Jack, who “taught all of us…so much about not just all the gay men and women whose love is denied by society, but just as important, the greatness of love itself.”

To glean an insight into Lee’s career, check out the fascinating Regis Dialogue he did with his writer/producer James Schamus at Walker prior to the film’s release–before Brokeback Mountain became a household name.